Affirmative action

[Lynne Henderson]

RE: Affirmative actionHow is it race-conscious hiring when a person of color
gets an offer and not race conscious hiring when a white person gets an
offer?  That is, why is the unspoken modifier always "white"?  That is, the
underlying assumption is candidates will be white and if different ethnicity
is taken into account, it  immediately becomes "race-conscious hiring?"
Lynne
 -----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for con law professors
[mailto:CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu]On Behalf Of Volokh, Eugene
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2001 1:23 AM
To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Affirmative action


                  Hmm -- these seem like interesting speculations, but are
they really sufficient under Croson to justify a race-conscious hiring
process such as the one Leslie Goldstein describes?  They don't strike me as
particularly likely, but even if one finds them plausible, it seems to me
that one needs more than just some plausible speculation to justify a
racially preferential remedy.

                  Also, I'm curious:  Which schools are these in which
"minority LSAT scores are strongly negatively correlated with academic
performance"?  I confess I find this quite surprising -- I'd love to hear
more details.

                  Eugene



  Yvette Barksdale writes:

    -----Original Message-----
    From:   Barksdale, Yvette [SMTP:7barksda at JMLS.EDU]
    Sent:   Thursday, March 01, 2001 8:52 PM
    To:     CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
    Subject:        Re: Affirmative action

    I  think these  statistics   (example - white women and men of color
start
    at "somewhat more prestigious schools" than white men)  are misleading,
and
    not helpful in determining whether  individual hiring processes reflect
    bias.

    First, these statistics include only hirees, and tell us nothing about
those
    who were rejected.  Were their credentials better or worse than the
hirees?
    What were the reasons for  their rejection? Was racial bias a factor?
For
    example, my observation is similar to Leslie's - hiring candidates of
color
    at majority white institutions is very difficult outside of an
"affirmative
    action or diversity"  mode, because  white faculty's mental picture of a
    "normal" faculty hire is almost always white (and not just white, a
white
    clone of themselves)  Accordingly, minority applicants in this "normal
mode"
    often get rejected as "not what we're looking for this year."
Nevertheless,
    such a racially exclusionary process would  be perfectly consistent with
a
    statistic that showed on average the  ultimate black male hiree  had
    somewhat lower credentials than white male "normal" hirees, even though
    many better qualified minority applicants had been rejected along the
way
    (both in and out of diversity mode).

    Second, these aggregate statistics  obscure wide variations among
schools.
    LSAT scores are an analagous example. Nationally, LSAT scores are weakly
    positively  correlated with law school performance for students of
color.
    However, this national statistic hides wide variations among individual
    schools. In some schools,  minority student LSAT scores are very
strongly
    correlated with academic performance. In other schools, minority LSAT
scores
    are strongly negatively correlated with academic performance - the
higher
    the LSAT score, the worse the minority students do.    National LSAT
scores
    say little or nothing about what's going on at your school. Similarly,
    saying "on average  black men candidates get better jobs than comparable
    white men " says little about what occurs in individual schools.

    Just as statistics alone rarely prove discrimination, they also rarely
    disprove discrimination.

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